JP 2006-189394 A1 discloses an agent device for a vehicle, which displays an image of an agent that communicates with a vehicle occupant. In the device, it is determined whether a vehicle occupant is talking to the agent image, based on detection results of a visual line detection unit that detects a direction of the occupant's face or a visual line of the vehicle occupant and a speech recognition unit that detects speech of the vehicle occupant.
JP 2004-310034 A1 discloses an interactive agent system, which determines whether a speaker is in a particular emotional condition (for example, feeling impatient) by monitoring a change in position of pupils shown in an image of his/her face captured by a camera.
JP 2002-24285 A1 discloses a user support device, in which an individual user agent is embedded. The individual user agent has a function of acquiring personal data from a user, which function is activated according to a frequency of use of the agent by the user.
JP 2007-133728 A1 discloses an agent device including an agent means with an attitude judging means. The attitude judging means judges that a user is less cooperative if the user does not respond to a question for attitude judgment.
JP 2001-249949 A1 discloses a feeling generating method for generating a feeling of an agent toward an item proposed by a computer, according to a popularity rank of the item.
However, the techniques described in JP2006-189394A1 and JP2004-310034A1 merely identify a user's attitude or feeling toward an agent by detecting a visual line of a vehicle occupant or monitoring a change of position of the pupils of a speaker. The technique described in JP2002-24285A1 merely determines whether to activate a function according to a frequency of use of an agent. The technique described in JP2007-133728A1 merely determines whether a user has a predominant attitude by counting the number of instructions provided by the user. The technique described in JP2001-249949A1 merely changes an attitude of an agent representing its confidence, according to a tallied ranking of agent's proposals. In the techniques described in the foregoing documents, an interactive character does not make a response based on a fact that it has been selected from among plural characters, or does not make a response that makes a user aware of a relative ranking of the character.
An object of the present invention is to enable a character selected by a user from among plural characters to interact with the user based on comparison between the character and another character.